This course will look at literature’s representation of, and role in, the social upheaval of the postbellum and turn-of-the-century eras. We’ll examine writings by authors concerned with making literature more directly politically engaged and by authors struggling to make literature a sacrosanct aesthetic arena free from social concerns. We’ll study the founding of an African-American tradition of letters in the aftermath of Emancipation and the Civil War. We’ll examine the ways in which machines and new technologies revised conceptions of the human body and mind. Finally, we’ll study shifts in the representation of sexualities amid these other forces. Throughout, our focus will be not solely on historical and cultural issues, but on the narrative tactics employed to represent them.